No matter how insignificant the thing you have to do, do it as well as you can, give it as much of your care and attention as you would give to the thing you regard as most important. For it will be by those small things that you shall be judged.

There is never enough time…Time is money…So much to do and so little time…Time is running, you must catch it!

If we look around, today, time became a very big issue and subject of discussions. Almost everybody is complaining about lack of it. People are overwhelmed and tired. Life transformed into a roller coaster, which implies fast reactions and adjustments otherwise people simply are kicked out from the social system. It is like a continuous agony. The interesting fact is that, specifically today, more than ever before people have access to many facilities, to technology which reduced a lot the amount of work human beings used to do a hundred years ago. Despite that, thou, people feel more than ever before the pressure of not having enough time to live their own life. Did the time change its speed? Did human beings change their perception toward the time consistence or the referential life milestones? Why is everybody so in a hurry to live, running like a mouse on a treadmill, feeling completely unhappy all along? When all this race started? What is time?

“Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, it seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, it time.

Calendars and clocks exit to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem an eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.

Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart”

“Momo”, written by Michael Ende, is a tale which holds a deep message behind an interesting children’s story. The main idea of the book is focused on how people perceive and lose their life time without noticing that. The author emphasizes the fact that men are actually totally unaware about the most precious moments of their existence; they take for granted their dreams, skills, relations, simple things like the ability to see the sunlight in the morning, to hear the melancholic waves of the ocean, to feel the fresh and soft grass under the feet…So often people just forget that they exist on the earth, being lost somewhere between future wishes and past disappointments. Unfortunately, so many fall into the trap of clinging to shallow, material things while believing that the dreams, the persons, the experiences can be postponed for later. And here comes the unhappiness, the boredom, the feeling of a senseless life in the end.

“Just as people have eyes to see the light with and ears to hear sounds with, so they have hearts for the appreciation of time. And all the time they fail to appreciate is as wasted on them as colors of the rainbow are wasted on a blind person or the nightingale’s song on a deaf one. Some hearts are unappreciative of time, I fear, though they beat like all the rest.”

Momo, the main character, is a girl who reminds to readers about the tremendous importance to appreciate the beauty of each second. Looking from her perspective everybody can see how simple, actually, life can be. Momo is the only girl who seems to have her eyes wide open to world’s wonders while all the rest are absolutely unaware of their blindness. She bravely engages herself in saving her friends from their numbness and misery, willing to resist to an entire army of men in gray, who tricked and persuaded people to sell their time to “Timesaving bank”.

“But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved the less they had.”

Momo succeeded to rescue her friends…In real life, I believe Ende’s book, itself, is meant to save us, helping to acknowledges the fact that we became victims of our own evils, that we carelessly started to trade the time for worthless things, forgetting it is limited actually.

An important message, which this novel stands for, is that human beings must get out of the trap and start living the moment, enjoying simplicity, appreciating each second lived on earth.